


Spoonbridge and Cherry

by warriorpoet



Category: Young Adult (2011)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:04:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Matt tries to get used to being Mavis Gary's rock bottom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spoonbridge and Cherry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [juiceboxhero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juiceboxhero/gifts).



Being somebody's rock bottom could take a while to get used to.

Matt thought about that when he woke up and Mavis was gone, and wondered if maybe he wasn't quite rock bottom. Maybe he was like the first step out of rock bottom. A handhold back up after falling off the cliff. The ambulance siren approaching in the distance as she lay battered at the base of the mountain, all mangled and gross and counting the seconds until help arrived.

Or maybe he was more like a bystander. The hiker on the trail at the bottom who just happened to be passing by with some bandages and a splint in his pack. The guy who was just there and decent enough to lend a hand rather than make a hilarious video of the corpse of her dignity and let it go viral on YouTube.

Matt rolled over and decided this line of hiking metaphor was particularly fucking stupid and that, yes, he was probably Mavis Gary's rock bottom.

He wasn't surprised that she was gone, his t-shirt balled up on the floor the only sign that she was ever there. A tiny smudge of makeup on the collar, the faint smell of her perfume and sweat.

No goodbye. No note. No thank you. No surprise. No big deal.

He was a little sore, so it was slow going when he finally bit the bullet and went up to the kitchen. Sandra was there, and he was pretty sure that she was late for work.

"Why are you still here?"

"Mavis left," she said, like she hadn't heard his question.

"Yeah." Matt poured a bowl of Lucky Charms and felt his sister's eyes shooting shocked lasers through the back of his head.

"Was she here all night?"

"Yeah."

"What – why – was she – did you – "

Matt smiled to himself as he set the milk down on the counter. He turned to Sandra. "Yeah," he said, smug as all hell. 

The look on her face was the funniest shit he'd ever seen.

" _How_?" she choked.

He sat down across from her. "Mind your damn business and go to work."

"But..."

"Go to work."

The wounded stinkeye she gave him before she got up to leave was just about the second funniest shit Matt had ever seen.

\----

People couldn't stop talking about her.

It was all Matt overheard at Champion O'Malley's.

That really hot blonde lady who was in here a couple days ago? The one who insisted she didn't need to eat? The one who was falling all over Buddy Slade? Didn't you hear?

Mavis Gary is fucking crazy. She had a total meltdown. In front of everyone.

You didn't know?

He couldn't help but wonder what she'd think. If she'd embrace that as the new her. Crazy Mavis, instead of Prom Queen Mavis, Best Hair Mavis. As long as they remembered her for something.

But then he remembered her, the way he knew her, and didn't think that even she would be able to sustain that level of humiliation for all the notoriety in the world.

He wanted to defend her, sort of, or at least tell people that they had it wrong, all of it, most of it. But there wasn't any point. Once those people got a story set in their heads, there wasn't any trying to change it. He knew that better than anyone.

So Matt just remembered her holding him and the way she looked when she couldn't cry anymore. He went back work, to purchase orders and receipts and endlessly neat columns of numbers. He let himself get obsessive with how straight those columns and rows were—he was proud of them, to be honest—and eventually the perfect circle at the bottom of a six replaced Mavis in his mind.

\----

After a couple of weeks he thought everyone had probably had enough of talking about Mavis Gary. He thought it might be safe to come out of the back office and sit in the restaurant when it wasn't too busy and get his work done there.

He kept getting distracted while alone in the office, anyway, and besides, getting an order of Buffalo wings and then sitting in the back office, hoarding them in his lair like some fantastical ogre of bitterness and hate and trying to lip read the customers, seeing her name when he couldn't hear it: that had gotten way beyond fucking depressing.

His move back out to the restaurant worked fine. It was okay. Everyone had moved on. Mostly everyone, mostly moved on

Numbers lined up, and his eights looked like infinity turned on its side. The Buffalo wings tasted a little less like sadness.

It was a couple of nights later when Buddy Slade himself came in. And it was only a couple of minutes until somebody was asking him about it.

"I don't know what to tell you. I missed the whole thing."

"Someone said she was screaming about having your kid. That she had your kid or something? Is that true?"

Matt stared down at the paper in front of him and tried to look busy.

"Yeah, she – I don't know. She had a miscarriage. It was a long time ago. Can we talk about something else?"

Matt drew a nine that somehow ended up looking more like a seven.

She never told him that.

It kind of made sense, though.

He pushed the half-full plate of Buffalo wings to the side and stared at a blank point on the page. The voices around him blurred into an indistinguishable hum. He didn't hear anything else Buddy and his friend had to say.

\----

Sandra had looked at him differently ever since that morning.

Weeks went by, then they turned into months, and it had been a while since Sandra even tried to bring up the subject of Mavis and the particular hows, whys, and what the hells of her presence in their house. 

But Matt sometimes still caught her staring at him across the dinner table with something he could only describe as curious awe, as though by the very act of attempting to stick his dick in Mavis Gary, he'd absorbed some of her essence, the whatever it was that made Sandra's eyes go wide like that whenever she said Mavis's name.

There was one night when he'd had enough.

His fork clattered onto the plate of tuna casserole and he rolled his eyes. "Okay, enough. What?"

Sandra chewed very slowly, and swallowed even slower. "What are you talking about?" she finally said.

"Why do you keep staring at me like I found the cure for boring?"

"Because you _did_!" she cried, then looked down at her plate, equally surprised by her outburst as Matt was. "Almost," she added quietly.

Matt didn't say anything. He knew if he waited long enough that Sandra would just keep talking to fill the silence.

"I don't get it," she continued. "Why you? Why you and not me? What makes you so special?"

He laughed. So much of his life had been spent asking "Why me?" that he eventually gave up on it. It wasn't a question he'd asked in a while. It wasn't one he'd ever heard asked about him.

"Don't laugh at me," Sandra muttered.

"I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you." He picked up his fork again and pushed the food around on his plate. "Believe it or not, I'm even lower on the social totem pole than you. That's why." He shovelled a forkful of casserole in his mouth and mumbled, "She's fucked up. That's why."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Sandra said.

He rolled his eyes again, and swallowed. "She had what was probably the worst day of her life. One of the worst days. And someone like me makes the perfect cherry on top of a shitty day sundae to someone like her. That's why."

Sandra nodded. She reached for the ketchup, and it always bugged Matt the way he would cook something that tasted like actual food that didn't come out of a box, and then fucking Sandra would fucking drown it in fucking ketchup. 

But he didn't say anything.

They didn't talk about it again, and Matt caught her looking at him that way less and less. After a while, he started to miss it.

He wished he could look at himself like that sometimes.

\----

Just as soon as everyone finally stopped bringing up the name Mavis Gary, it showed up again.

This time, it was Matt's inbox.

_Come to Minneapolis._

That was it. No Hello, how are you? No Please or Thank You. No explanations. No apologies.

Matt's response was just as short.

_Why?_

Her answer came time stamped at eight minutes past two in the morning, and said:

_Because. I'll tell you when you get here._

He told himself he wanted to go just to see how horribly things could go wrong. It seemed like a good enough excuse, in case anybody else wanted to know why. Because saying that he was, like, hopelessly in love with her or something fucking ridiculous like that was out of the question. Even thinking it was out of the question.

So he wrote back:

_Okay._

\----

He was momentarily both fascinated and terrified by the prospect of staying with Mavis, until she told him she'd get him a hotel room, on her dime. Then for a split second he was insulted, and worried, and then decided that it was probably for the best and he wasn't going to care about it. Free hotel room. Awesome.

Sandra offered to drive him, and the whole way there he could feel her eyes darting between him and the road, trying to will him into asking her to stay for the weekend as well. 

She trailed after him when they got to the hotel, and went all the way up to the room under the guise of helping him with his duffel bag.

"Okay. Thanks." Matt said as she set it down on one of the beds.

"You have two beds," she said.

"Yeah. A lot of room. It's great."

Sandra finally came out and said it. "You know, I can stay with you, if you want. You can't be with Mavis the whole time, I guess. You might get bored. You might want someone to go see things with."

Matt eased himself into the armchair, dropping his crutch by his side. "You have to work, Sandra."

"I can call in sick!"

"Maybe some other time, okay?"

Sandra looked down at the worn carpet and fiddled with a loose thread on her sweater. 

Matt sighed. "Hey, maybe you can come earlier on Sunday and we can look around or something before we go home?"

"Okay," she said, biting her lip. "Maybe."

"Thank you for driving me."

"Okay," she said again. "Well. Have a nice time."

And that's all she said before turning to the door and letting it slam shut behind her.

\----

The hotel seemed like it was the most generic chain thing Mavis could find for a cheap price, and it reeked of the ghosts of a thousand frustrated business travellers, jerking off to pay-per-view porn and ignoring calls from their wives back in Whereeverthefuck, USA.

Matt sat in the arm chair as the room got darker and thought about how that was the kind of guy he might have been if shit turned out differently. More mobile. Maybe more miserable. Who knew? Who cared?

The room got darker, and Matt turned the TV on, then eventually the lamp. The little glow from his phone almost went unnoticed as it buzzed quietly on the bedside table.

 _Downstairs_ , the text from Mavis said.

 _Well_ , Matt thought, and tried to stuff his expectations into a little ball and bury them deep in the back of his mind.

\----

Mavis didn't so much pace the lobby as just walk between the walls to make her presence known.

It wasn't a deliberate one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of thing, or even a distracted moving-for-the-sake-of-moving kind of thing. It was a kind of loping, expansive walk, like she needed to fill up every inch of available space at once. 

Her fingers brushed the dusty leaf of a plastic plant, she turned her nose up at a painting of the Mississippi River while one foot repeatedly drew a half circle across the same patch of marble floor. She shifted her weight to the other foot, and crossed the lobby again to idly flip through a rack of tourist information pamphlets.

Matt took a deep breath and forced himself to move, just as the elevator doors started to lumber closed again. He jammed his hand into the shrinking gap and they sprang back reluctantly, letting him in to the lobby.

"Mavis," he said.

She turned her head and hit him with a thousand-watt pasted on smile. "Matt! Hi!" 

She leaned down to squeeze his shoulders with her arm. Her giant purse slipped off her shoulder and almost knocked him to the ground.

He pat her on the back. "It's... nice to see you."

"Yeah." She pulled away. "You too."

They just stood there, nodding at each other like idiots. It went a beat past awkward, and over her shoulder Matt could see the desk clerk watching them. The kid quickly looked away when he noticed Matt noticing him, and busied himself with the shuffling of papers that had suddenly gained some kind of life-or-death importance.

Matt lifted a hand up and dropped it again by his side. "So..."

"Yeah!" Mavis said brightly. "Let's... go get hammered!"

She laughed, and it bounced off the walls, forcibly drowning the shuffling of paper and the quiet drone of lobby muzak.

\----

From the way she was dressed, Matt worried that she was going to take him to some club, ditch him with a disgustingly marked up bottle of bourbon that she half-heartedly offered to pay for, and find some guy to hook up with in front of him. She would dance with him while Matt sat on the sidelines like the fucking jackass he was, then take the guy home and make Matt watch that too. All to prove she wasn't the loser that Matt and everyone in Mercury must have thought she was.

He was relieved when she took him into a bar, all dark and wood panel and burgundy leather booths, not so different from Woody's back home. But a trendy simulation of a shithole. Not an actual shithole. The crucial difference.

"So... What was it you were going to tell me after I got here?" he asked the second they were seated.

"Huh?" Mavis said, looking around for a waitress. "Oh. There wasn't anything. I just needed to get you down here."

"Oh," was all Matt could come up with.

The waitress saved him, filling the talk void and offering alcohol. But all too quickly she had abandoned him, armed with their drink orders, leaving Matt with silence.

"So..." he started, with nothing to follow it up, hoping something might occur to him in the time it took that syllable to leave his mouth.

"How are you?" Mavis cut in, ignoring the awkwardness, barrelling through it like it didn't even exist to her.

It probably didn't.

"Fine."

"What have you been doing?"

Matt laughed a short, sharp laugh. "Nothing, Mavis. That's what I do. I do nothing."

"Sucks to be you," she scoffed.

"Yeah," he said. "And you?"

"I'm fucking great, Matt," she said, and there wasn't a hint of the sarcasm Matt would've expected of such a statement.

"Really."

"I've been so busy. They're doing a Waverly Prep movie, finally. I mean, I've been saying for years that's a license to print money. I'm writing the script. In between trying to get my own YA series started."

"Really." 

The waitress came with their drinks. Matt thanked her. Mavis kept talking.

"I know. It's about time on that too, right? It's still all very secret and developmental at the moment. Trying to plan out the first five books all at once and having to build something from scratch, you know, it's just such a huge amount of responsibility. I have to get it set up enough to let some other poor fucking sucker do all the work while I get all the credit. And the amount of money riding on this thing? God." 

Matt sipped his drink slowly and it felt like he was almost finished by the time she paused for breath. He quickly swallowed. "That... sounds great."

"It is great. It's fucking fantastic," Mavis laughed that laugh again, and here in the bar with all the ambient noise, the music and the voices and the glass clinking on glass, it wasn't quite so suffocating.

He nodded, just for something to do. She leaned forward, gesturing for him to do the same, and dropped her voice to a stage whisper. "I am going to make a _lot_ of money, Matt." She moved back again and shook her head, a trail of perfume left in her wake. "Maybe enough that it'll be embarrassing to live in Minneapolis and I'll have to get out of here. Finally. Go to New York or L.A., or fucking Paris or something. Somewhere. I can go anywhere that's _somewhere_."

Matt snorted into his drink and set it down. "Mavis Gary. Too big for Mercury, now too big for Minneapolis. If only there were a city that could contain her."

"Fucking Mercury." She scowled at nothing in particular, then looked to Matt. "You need to get out of there."

"Huh?"

"You could." Mavis shrugged, and gestured to the waitress for another round, moving right along.

\----

She didn't bring that up again, didn't really bring the topic of Matt up at all, and Matt spent a lot of time wondering why he came. How an expectation of something had managed to escape its cage and run wild in his brain without him even knowing it.

Their conversation dried up after a while. There was definitely more that they could say, but neither of them seemed to want to go near it. Their drinks ran dry not long after.

"I guess you have to get going, huh? Since you're so busy. Must have to go hit the day bright and early," Matt said when their empties were cleared and Mavis didn't make another order.

"Yeah. Of course. Something like that, anyway."

They split the tab and drifted outside. 

"So..." Matt said for about the billionth time, tempting the fates to get them both stuck in some never ending time loop of empty conversation. He laughed at himself and rubbed his eyes. "Thanks again for the hotel room, and the invitation out here, and... it was good to see you. You've... you're either exactly the same, or completely different. I can't really tell."

Mavis smiled down at her shiny black boots, suddenly quiet. She touched her hair, then dropped her hand and gripped her stupid giant purse in front of her, fingers in fists. "Do you want to come over?"

"What?" Matt's voice broke in disbelief. "Why? _Why_? What could that possibly achieve?"

"I want to talk to you."

"We just spent, like, an hour and a half in there not talking about anything at all."

"I know! I know, okay. So just... just fucking come over."

It was the way she finally looked him in the eye, the way she lost that forced smile, that meant there was no way he could turn her down.

"Okay," Matt said.

"Okay."

Mavis turned and started walking to her car, way too fast for him to keep up. He muttered a "Fuck you," under his breath, and tried his best to catch up to her.

\----

Her apartment looked messy, but messy in that way like the person had tried to tidy up by just picking up piles of crap and shoving them in closets or on shelves or under furniture.

A tiny ball of fluff shot out from behind a pile of magazines and jumped on its hind legs, trying to shadowbox Matt with its front legs before Matt could even register what the hell it was.

"Dolce, get down," Mavis sighed

After figuring out that this must be Mavis's dog, Matt leaned down and cooed, "Hey, little guy."

"Don't try to make friends with him."

"What? Why not?"

"You're a bad influence." She laughed, and it sounded more normal this time.

"I think he'd need a friend after having to live with you," he shot back. 

She groaned. "C'mon," she said, unzipping her boots and tossing them against the wall. "We'll go sit outside."

He followed her to the balcony and found her kicking empty tubs of dog food into one corner.

"Sit," she said, pointing to a lawn chair. She disappeared while he got settled, returning a few moments later with a bottle of scotch and two glasses.

She sat on the concrete and poured. "So..." she said.

Matt laughed as he took the glass from her. He couldn't help it. "Not this again."

"Yeah."

They were silent for a moment, and it wasn't quite the uncomfortable silence from the bar. 

"Nice place," Matt eventually said.

"You want to live here?"

He barely had a chance to register the question before she went on.

"I mean, obviously you probably wouldn't want to live _here_ right away at least. It's not really big enough for both of us. But, I don't know... just... if you were here, somewhere here, we could find something, and then later—"

Matt found his voice. "Whoa, whoa. What the fuck are you talking about?"

Mavis had changed on the drive back from the bar. It was like being in public flipped a switch in her, made her be someone else, someone far less interesting to him. But alone with him she wasn't so different from how she was the last time he saw her. It could have just been that she was finally drunk enough to stop caring about the facade, to start being real. 

She stared through the bars in the balcony railing, down at the dark, flat ribbon of river below. "I want you to be here," she said.

"Wait. What happened to the movie, and the new series, and Paris and the... the fucking Brink's truck of cash you're going to ride around in?"

"It was bullshit! Okay, Matt? Is that what you want me to say? I'm a fucking liar, because I don't know what else to do." Mavis slammed the glass on the floor so hard that Matt was sure it would shatter. Her eyes were sharp and cutting as she leaned forward, glaring up at him. "Are you happy? Every shitty thing you ever said about me was true."

"Not everything I said about you was shitty," he said quietly.

"See?" she laughed. "That's why. That's why I need you here."

"Why?" He almost didn't want to know.

"Because you like me. You know what a fucking piece of shit loser I am and you like me."

Matt sighed. Now he definitely didn't want to know. "If that's the only reason you want me around, Mavis, pretty soon I'm going to end up hating your fucking guts."

She looked away from him again, and in the darkness he could just barely see her eyes glass up, her face crumble a little.

"Don't cry..." he sighed, and set his drink down.

"I'm not," she said through gritted teeth. "I'm just fucking sick of everything ending. First there was high school, then there was college, and – and Buddy, and then my marriage, and then work, and it all fucking ended. I tried to go back to the beginning and start over again and then – then what? There's nothing left. Everything just fucking ends and I've run out of shit to replace it with."

"Well..." Matt thought for a while. "You could get a hobby?"

"Oh, what, like gluing dolls together? Awesome."

"Hey. I'm perfectly happy with my place in life," he said sharply, and realized just as the words came out that it was probably a gross overstatement. Bordering on being a bigger lie than any Mavis had come up with in the past couple of hours.

Mavis caught the way he cringed at his own words and poked her finger at his face in triumph. "You're _not_. You need to leave too. You do. You're better than that. You're better than _them_."

"No. I'm really, really not."

"Don't you want to be somewhere else? Somewhere where nobody knows anything about you? Somewhere where you're not just Hate Crime Gay Guy, and you can... you can _do_ something."

"Well, in Mercury everyone knows you're the crazy bitch who ruined the Slades' baby naming party. How has that worked out for you here, where nobody knows that except you?"

Mavis stared in silence at the lights from passing cars below, and Matt seriously thought for a second that she was about to stand, lean over the railing, and just let herself drop.

"I can't move away from myself," she said.

"Yeah. It... I'm surprised it took you that long to figure it out, really."

"Fuck you," she said quickly, like a reflex.

"What would it be like, though? Really, what do you think it would be like?"

"What would what be like?" 

"If I moved here."

She laughed, looking up at him again. "I don't even know."

"Probably terrible, right?"

"You're kind of an enabler."

"Bullshit."

"You _are_." She laughed again and wiped her eyes. 

Matt laughed too. "Would you even want to be seen out in public with me? I mean, honestly."

Mavis went quiet again. She was quiet for a long time.

"You don't need to answer that," Matt said. He knew. He didn't need to hear it. Hearing it would hurt, even though he knew.

"No," she finally said, so soft he almost couldn't hear it over the traffic rumble. "I would."

"No," Matt said. "I think you'd like to think you would."

"I can be better when I'm with you," she insisted.

"You don't need me to not be an asshole. I'm not going to be your fucking charity project. Just... don't be an asshole."

"It's not _charity_ – "

"Look, I'm not, like, the hiker at the bottom of the mountain who comes wandering along with splints and a cell phone to call for the ambulance. I'm not your fucking footholds. Okay?"

Mavis stared up at him, her brow furrowing. "What?" She grabbed Matt's crutch and clanged it against the railing. "You're not a hiker? Right. No shit. What the fuck are you even talking about?"

Matt snatched his crutch back before she could lose her grip and it ended up on the street. "Just... just fucking forget it, okay?"

They went quiet again. Mavis cradled her glass to her chest, lost in the dark recesses of her own fucked up brain. After a while, Matt reached down and poked her shoulder.

"You're gonna be okay."

"Sure. Of course." She sighed. "You know, I'd probably end up hating you too."

"Yeah? How come?"

"Because you like me."

Matt laughed. "Yeah. I hate me for that too."

\----

He stayed a while longer and they sat around, just bullshitting. They didn't bring up the topic of Them again, if Them was even enough of a thing to warrant being a distinct topic of conversation. For that, Matt was both grateful and kind of disappointed.

Unwanted, freely roaming expectations had a way of doing that.

He thought it would have been nice to sleep with her again. Nice as much as any impossibly bad decision can be nice.

She hugged him at the door and kissed him on the cheek, though, and that was kind of nice in its own way.

"So what are you going to do with yourself?" Matt asked.

"I don't know. Maybe I will just go somewhere else for a while." 

Up close, in the light like this, he could see smudges at the corners of her eyes from where her eye makeup had run. He knew that was probably the last thing he would remember about her, the thing that would stick after he forgot everything else, the thing he would still remember a million years from now when he was the only person in Mercury who ever thought of the name Mavis Gary.

"I really am thinking of working on my own series though. So... I guess... that," she added with a shrug. "Maybe I'll have to put a character based on you in there."

"The weak-willed nerd who will do anything the homecoming queen asks him?"

Mavis half-smiled ruefully. "Not quite anything."

\----

Matt went back to his hotel. He spent the next day alone in his free room, not doing much of anything at all.

\----

"Did you have fun?" Sandra asked when she came to pick him up.

"I don't know," Matt said honestly.

"How's Mavis?"

"Fine? I guess?"

Matt eased himself into the car and felt the trunk slam as Sandra locked his duffel bag away. She slid in behind the wheel.

"So did you get to go see things? Do you want to go somewhere now?"

He shrugged and stared straight ahead. "I'm kinda tired."

"Really?" Sandra sounded both curious and disappointed.

Matt tried not to smile to himself. "Yeah. Let's just go home."

"Okay."

"We'll come back some other time, maybe."

"Are you going to visit Mavis again?"

Matt was quiet as Sandra started the car.

"No," he said as she pulled out of the lot. "I don't think so."

"Oh."

Matt got the feeling that Sandra took the longest route to the highway possible, giving herself a tour just to spite him.

He watched the city pass and didn't say anything.

Sandra pulled on to the highway, finally, with one last dejected sigh. 

Matt stared out the window, and they headed for home.


End file.
